Abstract
During the twenty years of close, sometimes fraught, and eventually constructive diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union lasting from the early 1970s to the early 1990s, the state of the nuclear balance between them was never far from the center of their attention. During the Cold War era conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union took on a heightened significance because of the possibility, however remote, that such crises might escalate to the level of all-out thermonuclear war. Even in the absence of crises, supposed imbalances between the nuclear forces of the two superpowers, especially if linked to an alleged operational superiority possessed by one side or the other, could themselves become sources of enmity as the inferior side sought to eradicate its disadvantage with a build up of its own nuclear arsenal.
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Notes
For Reagan’s ignorance about nuclear weapons and arms control, see Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), 291.
For an analysis of these proposals, and a listing of the details of Reagan’s mil-itary build up, see Frances FitzGerald Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars And The End Of The Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 151–152, 181–185.
Strobe Talbott, The Russians and Reagan, Foreword by Cyrus R. Vance (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1984), ix.
Beth A. Fischer, “Reagan and the Soviets: Winning the Cold War” in W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham (eds.), The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2003), 117.
For Shultz’s views on linkage, see George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, My Years As Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 488–489.
Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years at the Pentagon (London: Michael Joseph, 1990), chapter 10, “The Strategic Defense Initiative,” 204–232.
Ronald Reagan, An American Life (London: Hutchinson, 1990), 13, 549.
Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul ofMankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007).
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© 2008 Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies
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Head, S. (2008). Reagan, Nuclear Weapons, and the End of the Cold War. In: Hudson, C., Davies, G. (eds) Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616196_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230616196_6
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